


Lasting Impressions

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 12:46:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5785825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From a strange point of view, the scar is a gift, and so as a gift it is meant to be kept with a certain honor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lasting Impressions

…

She traces the scar with one callus-hard thumb, delicate and assured as though marking a new border on the map. 

Objectively speaking, it is awful to look at. It twists the skin all around itself, bisects his right cheek and pulls his mouth sideways into an expression of pained forbearance. Its texture is rough like stone. It pales or flushes red depending on his temper. If her lightsaber had come from a different angle, she would’ve left him blinded as well as bleeding there in the snow.

Rey’s hand settles on his jaw, where the scar is widest.  His eyes remain closed.  

“I gave this to you.”

“Yes.” Ben turns his face against her palm. Rey feels a smile form and vanish beneath her fingers. “After my personality, I consider it my best feature.”

“Does it ever hurt?”

“Only when it rains.” His eyes open slyly. “Would you undo it, if you were able?”

Rey almost lets her hand drop, but his own comes up to press it in place.

And this is what disarms her most, what makes her heart seem defenseless-soft enough to hold the impression of fingerprints:

Because all this time she has expected him to be cold, with a removed and frictionless polish to match the former mask and cloak. But Ben Solo is a man who never quite finished his boyhood, the way Rey is a woman who never quite got to be a girl – so instead she has been offered his clutching, desperate, terrified vulnerability, which betrays some vague anticipation of undeserved joy and would be laughable from any critical distance.

(If he’d ever let go long enough for her to get that far, of course. He usually doesn’t.

As someone who still dreams of waiting away her life in a desert with no horizon, wondering why she has been forgotten, Rey must confess that she usually doesn’t mind.)

She taps her thumb, one-two.

“No,” she says. “I don’t think so.”

“Good.”

…


End file.
